


Protégé

by lordofthedreadfort



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Drug Use, Drugged Sex, Dubious Consent, Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Garrett Jacob Hobbs as ur classic voyeuristic hallucination, M/M, weird family vibes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-07 01:27:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20301169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lordofthedreadfort/pseuds/lordofthedreadfort
Summary: Retelling of Œuf. In the wake of Nick Boyle's death, Hannibal takes Abigail under his wing. He observes the profound effect Abigail has on Will and wishes to use her to get underneath Will's skin. In return, Abigail wants to thank Hannibal for keeping her secret. She wants to learn from him. She wants to belong.The perfect opportunity presents itself when Will makes it in time for their family dinner.





	Protégé

**Author's Note:**

> there is very little about the show that i would ever dare to change, but i wish we had even more scenes that went into the strange, complex, overcharged dynamic between will and hannibal and abigail, and how they navigate those tensions and help/harm each other. (... mostly harm, lets be real)
> 
> this fic is my small attempt at playing with this dynamic whilst trying to keep mostly within the confines of the season 1 canon. i hope you enjoy!

ELECTRA

A family of dead people is sometimes better than a family of living ones.

CLYTEMNESTRA

You’re morbid. You’ve taken away my appetite.

ELECTRA

That’s what I wanted.

**\- DREAMS OF CLYTEMNESTRA, Dacia Maraini, trans. Tim Vode**

*

HANNIBAL

Feeling paternal, Will?

WILL

Aren’t you?

HANNIBAL

Yes.

* * *

“Tell me about your bad dreams.”

This is how it starts. Abigail has grown used to concealing her shadows from other people, but with Hannibal it is different. She experiences the sort of relief that people encounter at confessional; the same, strange relief as sinking a blade into the exposed belly of a deer and coaxing dark blood to the surface. And she has seen Hannibal’s shadow in turn. He was the Man on the Phone, there and not there on the morning of her last family breakfast, setting her rebirth into motion.

She sits on the edge of her sterile psychiatric bed and tells him about her dreams, all her memories made vivid with nightmarish colour. The threats that live behind her eyelids. Nicholas Boyle’s body split open like a ripe fruit, his chest gleaming wetly, his mouth shaping his surprise. Her reflection flickering in the mirror as her skin peels back to reveal the frightening smile of her father. Those girls, all of them just like her – wearing her clothes – taking her place in family portraits – leaving their hairs on her pillow – hitting frantically at the mirror from the reflective side, pleading with her to help them escape as her father’s smile looks on.

Her mother is a spray of blood, a blunt scream. When Abigail dreams of her, she dreams in spasms of guilt rather than grief: guilt for not loving her better, for not missing her more.

Her father is there but always just out of her line of sight. She feels his presence. It lingers with her like gunsmoke even after she jolts awake into the dark of the hospital room, heart in her mouth, remembering in a rush what has become of her family. Even now, talking about him to Hannibal, Abigail’s skin prickles with unease.

Once she falters into silence, Hannibal offers her a calm, knowing smile. “When you’re with me, you don’t have to lie about anything,” he reminds her.

He can sense what she is holding back. She resents him, at first, for not allowing her this one secret. But she likes the idea of shocking him. It holds more interest than shocking Alana Bloom (not difficult) or Jack Crawford (which will only solidify his suspicions) or Freddie Lounds (who seems to have had all the potential for shock knocked clean out of her). Her frantic confession of killing Nick Boyle did not startle Hannibal’s calm waters. But this might.

“I’m not lying,” she says, lifting her chin to meet his gaze. “I just wasn’t telling you everything.”

“I have exposed myself entirely to protect you,” he says. “My career, my reputation, my freedom. Do you not think you owe me something entirely in return?” He looks away, politely, as if allowing her room to consider the question.

“I suppose.” She swallows, her hand jumping involuntarily to the wound along her throat. “But it’s frightening, isn’t it? Showing yourself to someone else entirely. I’ve never done it before.”

Hannibal’s mouth softens at the corners. “You are safe with me, Abigail.”

The words unlock something deep inside Abigail. She describes her final, sacred dream to him. Will Graham coming down the hallway into the kitchen of her house, wary but resolute, his eyes dark and deep with underwater desire. Abigail rising to meet him. The same thrill of fear and knowing passing through them both. She goes to speak but finds she can’t: all she can do is watch him approach with a terrible, immutable yearning that grips her as Will drops to his knees and lifts his head heavenwards. He presses his face to her, his mouth moving wordlessly, his hands steady against her as he breathes her in, and desire floods so hot and fervent through her gut that Abigail is half-scalded, half-ruined. She trembles with anticipation as he unbuttons her jeans. She is afraid and alive.

There is quiet in the wake of her confession. Hannibal’s gaze is bright with interest, his mouth quirked once more with the suggestion of a smile, and Abigail finds herself considering whether he has dreams like that too, dreams damp and heavy with profound desire. Does Hannibal desire? He must.

She struggles with the silence, before saying, “It’s just a dream. Just a... reaction to trauma, or whatever. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“I’m glad you told me,” Hannibal responds. He reaches for his coat and then pauses, as if inhaling the smell of her fantasy. “Shall we go? Dinner awaits.”

* * *

ABIGAIL

I want to work for the FBI.

HANNIBAL

I would certainly feel safer if you were in the FBI. Protecting my interests.

ABIGAIL

They wouldn’t let me though, would they? Because of what my dad did.

HANNIBAL

Only if they believe that’s in your nature too.

ABIGAIL

Nature versus nurture.

HANNIBAL

You’re not your father’s daughter. Not anymore.

(...)

HANNIBAL

Do you trust me?

* * *

Does she trust him? The answer is no, and yet simultaneously it is yes. The answer matters less once Abigail has consumed the psilocybin on his request and reality starts to blur and melt around the edges. She moves in a gentle daze from one side of the kitchen to the other, watching Hannibal work. She trusts him more this way, witnessing him cook: he has the precise manner he must wield as a psychotherapist, the same measuring and coaxing, but the kitchen domesticates the skill. Robs it of threat.

She trusts him less when Will arrives, red-eyed and nervy, though Will offers her a genuine smile as he catches sight of her. They share a glance which says, half-spoken: Hannibal never said you would be here. Abigail is electrified by the contact.

The two of them sit at the dinner table and listen, uncomfortably, to Hannibal and Alana disagree in the next room. Abigail stares in confused fixation at Will’s mouth, watching the shadows bloom and distort around his head, trying not to let her inebriated state show. A muscle in Will’s jaw jumps every so often as though he is grinding his thoughts between his teeth. She thinks he will go and investigate what is happening in Hannibal’s kitchen – but he stays seated, staring at her as if trying to see inside her head. Can he sense the difference in her?

“What do you think they’re talking about?” Abigail asks in a staged whisper, though she imagines they are talking about her. She looks away from the row of empty chairs that line the dining table; they unsettle her.

“I’m not sure,” Will says. “Whatever it is, you shouldn’t worry about it.”

“I’m not worried.”

When Hannibal enters the room – smiling his familiar, composed smile – he is alone. “A minor professional disagreement,” he says, “but I don’t anticipate further interruptions this evening. Shall we eat?”

* * *

The image of the distressed female most likely to linger in memory is the image of the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl. [...] She is abject terror personified. If her friends knew they were about to die only seconds before the event, the Final Girl lives with the knowledge for long minutes or hours. She alone looks death in the face.

**\- MEN, WOMEN AND CHAIN SAWS: GENDER IN THE MODERN HORROR FILM, Carol J. Clover**

* * *

“Everything comes back to family,” Abigail says, her voice thick with lethargy, staring at Will across the dining table. The food is gone; they are talking of the case Will is currently working on. He shifts whenever he makes eye contact with Abigail and tries repeatedly to steer the conversation in another direction, though he can’t seem to think of anything less upsetting. Hannibal is interested, though politely so, as if he cannot recognise Will’s discomfort. But Abigail does; she finds herself searching it out, experiencing a dizzying sort of satisfaction whenever Will answers another question with a strained, uneven smile.

She thinks, briefly, of these Lost Boys Will described, shooting their mothers in the head. Trading one life for another, baptising new lives with old blood. Perhaps her mother’s blood bought her new life. Perhaps Nick Boyle’s did.

Will glances down at his plate. “I suppose so.”

“Before anything else, we are the product of our formative experiences.” Hannibal refills his and Will’s glasses, ignoring the jerky motion Will makes to ward him off. “If we wish to move beyond family – or, if not move beyond, move through – we must seek a catalyst for change. Something we desire which our family cannot provide.” He pauses, savouring some internal thought. “Abigail, have you told Will what you told me earlier about your dreams? Would you like to?”

Abigail fights to control her confusion, but with the psilocybin hot beneath her skin it is difficult to mask herself. She seems to be acting two seconds after everyone else, fording through water. A moment later, she remembers everything else she and Hannibal discussed earlier: taking control, transforming trauma into pleasure. When she glances at him, he inclines his head in the barest outline of a nod, and she understands in a rush of fevered clarity what Hannibal wants her to do.

“What dreams?” Will asks.

“I had a dream about you,” she says, emboldened by the drug and her own terrible potential. “We were in my home. You knelt before me and you touched me with your mouth. It frightened me, a bit, the way you looked at me, but I wanted it badly. I still do.”

When Will finally reacts, he turns away from her, towards Hannibal, his body taut like a pulled bow string. “I don’t think this is appropriate.” His voice cracks on the last word.

“I disagree,” Hannibal says smoothly. “I believe that Abigail is at a point where she needs to move beyond her formative influences. She must seek out that catalyst. And you have an opportunity to be that catalyst for her, to help her coax her shadows into substance. I think it would be therapeutic for both of you.”

Abigail glances from one to the other, feeling a shiver run down her spine at the oddness of them talking about her. She seems entirely separate from her body, forged and reforged with their words; she exists only as a body, flushed and delirious and hungry to be touched. Now she has spoken her dream aloud, Will appears transformed: his gaze heavier, his emotions brighter.

She has power over him. She has seen it in the way he looks at her; the way Hannibal talks about him in their conversations, as if to reproach her lack of care. Now is the time to use it. Especially in this transformed state, with her potential before her like a ripe orange, waiting for her to sink her thumbs through the peel and pull everything apart.

“I think it would help me,” she blurts out during a momentary lapse in Hannibal and Will’s discussion. They both turn to her: Hannibal mild, Will stricken. “I look at you and I see my parents. Ever since my father.... well, I’ve felt powerless. And lonely. And my dreams have all been so bad, except for that one. And...” She inhales, testing the limits of her daring, sensing Hannibal’s gaze on her. “Don’t you think you owe me?”

Deep inside, she knows what she is doing. She is playing the part she played for her father – baiting, luring – though instead of coaxing her doubles to their deaths like a self-murdering siren, she is coaxing Will to herself, and through herself to Hannibal. They are making a family. Abigail sees it then, rendered in beautiful, hallucinatory colour, Will and Hannibal and her parents all melting into one, and the sight frightens and excites her.

* * *

JACK

Family can have a contagion effect on some people. Influences them to adopt similar behaviours and attitudes.

* * *

Will is trapped between Abigail and Hannibal.

It is absurd to think that way. Abigail is still half a girl and dazed with trauma; Hannibal is only suggesting, though his suggestions carry all the weight and persuasion of professional expertise and genuine care. And yet Will’s mouth is dry and his fingers stiff around the wine glass. The sensation is not unlike how he feels when he is interrupted from his violent reconstructions, half in one psyche, half in another, disoriented and stained by his thoughts. The analogy is an unpleasant one; he takes a long swallow of his drink to distract himself.

“What better way to prove that you are not Garrett Jacob Hobbs?” Hannibal murmurs to Will. “If you are so convinced of your being separate to him, this act should not be transgressive. Abigail is consenting. And you desire her.”

Will closes his eyes to the terrible truth of Hannibal’s statement. “I’m not sure my desires should come into play.”

But when he opens his eyes, he can’t help but stare straight at Abigail, seeing her in a new light. Her overbright gaze; her slack, red mouth; the pink of her cheeks and the sweep of her lashes. The accusation behind her eyes: you killed my father. He feels struck by the accusation, impaled on its antlers; he will tear something vital in his efforts to free himself. He wants to free Abigail too. He wants to help her.

Slowly, Abigail unwraps her scarf from around her neck, exposing the thin scar on her throat. And Will finds himself nodding. He doesn’t trust his voice enough to speak.

They rise together. Abigail steadies herself on the table and moves around the room towards him, sharing a single private glance with Hannibal before she looks back at Will. In that moment it is suddenly the easiest thing in the world to lower himself to his knees, casting his gaze up towards her, his mouth parted as if to speak though no words come out. For Abigail, he reminds himself; in the deep light, the shadows dousing the hollow of her throat look wet.

He reaches out to touch her, his fingertips sliding uneasily down the slope of her waist, the hard bone of her hips through her jeans. When his hands go beneath her top, her skin is hot to the touch and their unlikely sameness stirs in his gut.

“Abigail,” he says, his voice low, and dips his head to exhale a hard breath against her. A little further, his mouth against the coarse material of her jeans, a stifled sound from above. There is a brief interruption as her hands go to her waistband and she fumbles with the zipper, and then her trousers are pushed down and he draws her closer, parting his lips against her underwear, feeling her jerk with sensation. An unpleasant intrusion: Abigail jerking against her father, struggling in his grasp. Will shoves it violently aside as he turns his face to the side, kissing the curve of her inner thigh, distancing himself from Hobbs with each illicit touch.

There is the scrape of chair legs. A hand briefly at the curve of his scalp; not Abigail’s. Will remembers Hannibal’s presence with a jolt, as if he has been woken from a heavy dream.

“Let’s go to bed,” Hannibal murmurs. Will tilts his face up, his nose brushing up against Abigail; her expression tremors with the sensation though her eyes remain shut, and Hannibal’s face is almost indistinguishable from the shadow the light has cast, standing behind Abigail with his hands paternally on her shoulders.

It has been years since Will went to bed with anyone; even longer since he desired it the way he does now, though the desire traps itself in the back of his throat as he meets Hannibal’s gaze. He is not truly going to bed with Abigail, after all. Just helping her. And helping himself, though as he stands he imagines he can see Garrett Jacob Hobbs watching him from the dining table.

Hannibal’s house is still a mystery to Will; larger than he expects, though the largeness is in part due to all the locked doors and hidden-away rooms, the burnished shadows and heavy ornamentation. In Will’s house it is difficult for anything to conceal itself which soothes him on nights he wakes with dead faces staring accusingly at him. But Hannibal clearly has no such anxieties. To Will, he appears a man that enjoys dwelling in possibility – in potential – and his house unfolds with a similarly sly experimentation as Hannibal guides him and Abigail to one of the bedrooms.

Once inside, Will reaches out convulsively to touch at Abigail’s arm. He wants to ask: are you sure? But when she turns to look at him, her movements languid and heavy, he finds the question constrict in his chest. His hand drops.

Hannibal takes off his jacket and rolls up his sleeves with a briskness that is the antithesis to the honeyed intimacy of the night. He talks in a low murmur to Abigail, his hand between her shoulders, guiding her to the bed as they both sit. They are a study in contrast: Hannibal with his shirt and waistcoat, Abigail soon in nothing but her underwear, her discarded clothes like breadcrumbs leading away from the door. The sight punches an ache into Will’s chest.

“Are you going to join us?” Hannibal asks, offering Will a benevolent smile.

Will eases himself onto the end of the bed, kneeling above Abigail, struck with vivid memory. They are arranged the way they had been on the kitchen floor of the Hobbs’ house, Abigail laid back with her head pillowed in Hannibal’s lap, Will at her feet, his expression taut and anguished. For a moment, the clean bedspread darkens and dampens around them, soaking with Abigail’s arterial blood, her eyes staring with bright helplessness up at him and her mouth shaping around choked pleas, the smell rising in the air, Hannibal’s hands slippery with viscera – and then Will blinks and the fantasy disappears.

“Are you alright, Will?” Hannibal’s mouth quirks at one corner. “It’s usual to find your thoughts taking on a life of their own. It is part of the process.”

“I thought we weren’t engaging in therapy,” Will manages, ignoring the urge to back away.

Hannibal slides a hand down to Abigail’s jaw, his thumb brushing thoughtlessly along her lower lip. “I can still wish to help you outside of a professional capacity. What’s a little bloodletting between friends?”

Will bites the inside of his cheek to stifle a laugh. The urge passes a moment later as Abigail opens her mouth to Hannibal’s touch and his thumb slides wetly along her tongue. She appears half-asleep, her eyes heavy-lidded, her face cast in bedroom shadows. Unease plucks at Will’s heart, but he remembers what Hannibal has just said, how his thoughts can take on a life and reality of their own, and casts them aside in favour of hooking his fingers beneath the material of Abigail’s underwear and pulling it slowly down her thighs, over her knees.

When he brings his mouth to her again, he tastes her arousal. Has she ever...? It’s a dangerous thought, another one he pushes away until his mind seems overcluttered at the corners with curious shadows. Slowly, warily, Will drags the flat of his tongue along her and listens to the audible hitch of Abigail’s breath, the shudder that passes through her thighs at the contact. Something about it – her visceral, unrestrained reaction, her simple pleasure – settles deep in Will’s gut and he licks into her again, following the rhythm of her breathing.

He draws back but Hannibal’s voice cuts through the silence. “No, Will. Resist the urge to break the illusion.” He sounds so certain that Will obeys him instinctively, returning his mouth to Abigail. She is hot against him and wetter than before – the realisation unlocks something primal and half-desperate in Will and before he can shake himself back into reality, he parts his lips further and begins to make deliberate shapes with his tongue against Abigail, coaxing stuttered sounds of pleasure from above.

Abigail reaches out to grasp at his hair. Will hears Hannibal talk to her in a low murmur but the praise is lost to the rush of blood in his eardrums and Abigail’s tentative touch at his scalp. Touching him the way she would a deer.

Will draws back just enough to drag two fingers through her until they are warm and slippery with her arousal. A small whimper breaks from her mouth when he eases the first inside her, feeling her tighten and shift. The sound dislodges something in Will’s chest; he crooks his finger and bends to press his tongue to her clit, circling it soothingly, tasting her with new pleasure.

Abigail’s grip tightens in his hair, encouraging.

He slides in a second finger, reaching deep inside Abigail until she shudders. She is hot and slick against him, arcing into the press of his mouth, unravelling around him in a way he had not expected but finds himself stirred by. A catalyst, Hannibal had suggested: she does feel like she is going through a transformation, hot and agitated against him.

Will wants in a desperate rush to take care of Abigail, to hold her close to him. To stroke her hair. Instead, he mouths between her thighs until she trembles, her grip on his hair weakening as she edges nearer and nearer to climax. 

His mouth is wet with her, his fingers moving in and out of her with his own quickening desire. He thinks of Abigail sticky with blood, flushed with pleasure, smiling with wary gratitude. Imagines her fishing with him, the two of them huddled together over the ice. Imagines Hannibal touching Will’s mouth the way he had Abigail’s, his thumb sliding over the sharp of Will’s canines, pressing down on his tongue. Hannibal’s hands wet with Abigail’s blood.

_ See? _ Garrett Jacob Hobbs whispers in his ear as Abigail bucks against his face, shuddering through her orgasm. _ See? _

Abigail’s hand drops away limply. Her uneven gasps fill the air; through the pounding bloodrush in Will’s eardrums, she sounds as if she is bleeding out.

* * *

I clung to him as though only the one who had inflicted the pain could comfort me for suffering it.

**\- THE BLOODY CHAMBER, Angela Carter**

*

They would meet in darkness; their encounters would be feverish and doomed.

**\- THE LUMINARIES, Eleanor Catton**

*

“You frighten me.” And indeed, he was shaking all over, every cell vibrating with the presence of the Gamayun, with the pressure of her words, so heavy, like a storm coming that he could feel in his knees, in his chest.

“Yes,” she said simply.

“I don’t understand. I want to understand.”

“You will. Before the end. You will. You always do.”

**\- DEATHLESS, Catherynne M. Valente**

* * *

Abigail lies half-conscious on the bed, her cheeks fever pink, her lips parted. Will is desperately entranced by the sight of her slack against the sheets, her thighs parted, her taste still on the flat of his tongue; his guilt is a fishhook in his chest, caught on meat and muscle. When he pushes away from the bed, his cock throbs.

Hannibal rises to join him, his eyes overbright. His mouth is sharp with the suggestion of pleasure. “Tell me Will, do you feel in control?”

Will does laugh this time: a shorn-off, bitter sound. “I don’t know. I’m not sure what control feels like in this scenario. I feel responsible.”

“We owe it to Abigail to feel responsible,” Hannibal says. “We were there at the scene of her rebirth. Everything about her old life lost in an instance, and us as witnesses to the slaughter. It is only right you should feel close to her. Who else understands but the three of us?”

Hannibal comes very close. His hand grips at the side of Will’s face, his thumb pressing against Will’s chin with strange tenderness. And then he dips his face to Will’s and kisses him slowly, thoughtfully, kissing away the traces of Abigail lingering on Will’s tongue, grazing the sharp of his teeth on Will’s lower lip. Tasting Will’s shame, his guilt. His longing.

When he pulls away, his pleasure lives in his eyes though his mouth remains closed, controlled. “Does it confuse you, to be the subject of Abigail’s good dreams when you are the subject of so many of your own nightmares?”

“I’m not sure Abigail’s dream was good,” Will returns. His mouth hums with the phantom sensation of Hannibal’s kiss.

“And yet you re-enacted it in the hope of helping her. You have a wonderful potential for self-sacrifice.” And now Hannibal does smile, brushing along Will’s cheekbone with the pad of his thumb. Will’s thoughts are sludgy with arousal and the touch only agitates his desire like a healing wound. “One day, I believe you will make an excellent father.”

* * *

HANNIBAL

Abigail’s lost too. And perhaps it’s our responsibility, yours and mine, to help her find her way.

*****

The pain will remind us of each other. When we meet later, if there is a later, we will recognise each other by it.

**\- CASSANDRA, Christa Wolf**

*

For if he does not lose courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally arrive at the center of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him.

**\- WAITING FOR GOD, Simone Weil**


End file.
